Powder Burn

by Carl Hiaasen

  From what had once been a good neighborhood bar a blond youth appeared, wiping tears with a piece of blue silk. The silk matched his light T-shirt, which matched his pocketless jeans, which almost matched the tearful eyes. A circular gold pendant bounced uncertainly against the hollow, heaving chest.

  Meadows let the bike coast. There had to be a second act. There was. The youth took a deep breath, marched back to the bar and pulled open the door.

  “Bitch!” the young man screamed. “Cheating bitch. I hope he bites it off.” There was a commotion inside the bar. The youth walked swiftly away, clutching the silk handkerchief to his face as though it were an ice pack. Ah, to be young and in love, Meadows thought.

  Arthur stood at his usual corner, where the road turned east to dip toward the bay. Arthur was hard to miss. He was six-four in splay-toed feet that were indifferent to the burning concrete sidewalk. He wore his hair in braids. A wrap of beige and white batik circled his waist and breached at his ebony calves.

  “Hey, Chris,” Arthur called.

  “How you making it?” Meadows asked.

  “Lean time, brother. The heat is after me every time I turn around. A man can’t even stand on the street anymore without trouble.”

  To the very tense Miami police assigned to patrol the Grove, the theorem was simple: Anybody who stood on a street corner all day was peddling something—dex, ludes, weed, coke, even heroin. The cops rousted Arthur regularly, but they never busted him.

  “What you need”—Meadows laughed from his bicycle—“is a defense fund.”

  “Shit.”

  “I’ll get some T-shirts printed up. We’ll stage a rally.”

  “Fuck off, whitey,” Arthur said. “How about some chess later?”

  “Not tonight. I’m working on a project.”

  “Make it pretty, Frank Lloyd.”

  Meadows encouraged the old Raleigh down the gentle slope toward the library. Arthur was a friend. Meadows had seen him first in a neighborhood greasy spoon, where the black man had been engrossed in a battered book of chess openings. Good chess companions do not come easy in Miami, but your average citizen does not casually approach strange ragged giants and ask them for a game. So Meadows had simply eaten and left.

  A few days later, however, Meadows had been buying pencils and ink in an art supply shop when Arthur had approached him nonchalantly dragging a teenager in each ham-sized fist. It seems he had caught them popping the door locks on Meadows’s aged Karmann Ghia. That night the two of them had played chess by the pool, and Meadows had learned to his dismay that he was overmatched.

  “The man looks like a Rastafarian and plays chess like Morphy,” Meadows said to his beleaguered king. “OK, I give up. Who the hell are you?”

  “Just another refugee,” Arthur answered. He was, in fact, a computer technician of some talent who had saved his money, let his hair grow and dropped out. At night he worked effectively as a bouncer in a small downtown jazz club. By day he manned his street corner in the Grove. Meadows had never asked what he did there. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

  “GOING TO PERU, Mr. Meadows? You seem to have just about cleaned us out of Incas,” said the pleasant round-faced librarian. “Ecuador. Northern branch of the same family, I’m told.”

  When the last Incas’ sons had feuded, one had had his capital in Cuzco, the other in Quito. Would it have made any difference to the Incas, Meadows wondered, if they had known that under their empire lay reservoirs of oil that would centuries later become the lifeblood of civilization? Probably not—but tapping those reservoirs certainly had made a difference to the inheritors of the empire.

  Out in the Amazon vastness, Ecuador had oil and, with it, sudden national wealth, instant inflation, unprecedented international status and membership in OPEC. Would Señor Meadows consider designing a building to house the oil ministry in Quito? A skyscraper, por favor, something majestic and symbolic of the new Ecuador. Meadows hadn’t decided. He hadn’t liked the pretentious, nouveau riche army officers who had approached him, but he was intrigued with the challenge: how to design a skyscraper consistent with the colonial heritage of mountain Quito and yet strong enough to resist the earthquakes there were nearly as common as revolutions in the Ecuadorean Andes? Before he made up his mind, he would do some homework.…

  He had just decided the rain would catch him on the way home, and turned to ask the librarian for a bag to protect the books, when he was intercepted by one of the most beautiful creatures he had ever seen.

  She stood squarely in his path, a half smile on her face, a twinkle in green eyes that seemed a mirror of Meadows’s own. Her blond hair was cut to the shoulder. She wore a plaid pinafore, white socks and white patent leather shoes.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  “My name is Jessica Tilden and I am five years old.”

  “Oh. My name is Chris Meadows and I am thirty-six years old. How do you do?”

  “Are you famous?”

  “No, of course not. Who says I’m famous?”

  “My mommy.”

  “Well, she probably means well, but she’s mistaken.”

  Jessica Tilden thought that one over. Clearly she would have more to say. Meadows couldn’t take his eyes off the little girl. There was something there in that pixyish, semimocking, I’m-not-through-with-you-yet expression. Something familiar.

  “Don’t you know it’s not polite to lie to little girls?”

  The voice came from over Meadows’s shoulder. It sent a shiver down his spine, a pounding in his chest. He felt lightheaded, weak, vulnerable. Meadows turned.

  “Hi, Sandy,” he said softly.

  “Hello, Chris.”

  Jessica was her mother’s daughter, no mistake about it. Except that her mother’s eyes were a bottomless blue and she wore a knee-length white cotton dress and sandals. The last time he had seen her she had worn a bikini and the blue eyes had sparkled with tears.

  They shook hands, there in the library. The ultimate absurdity, to shake hands among strangers with someone you once loved. Meadows didn’t know what else to do.

  “Your palms are all wet, Chris.”

  “I’m sweating. I came on the bike.”

  “Yes, I saw it outside; that’s why we came in.”

  “Gee, Sandy, it’s been…”

  “Almost six years.”

  “If she is Jessica Tilden, then you are…”

  “Mrs. Harold Tilden of Syracuse, New York.”

  “Syracuse. Yes, well, I’ve been there. Nice town.” It was not a nice town. It was an awful town; no architecture, no life, no sun, and he didn’t give a damn about Syracuse anyway.

  “How are things with you?” she asked with that gentle, private smile.

  “I can’t complain.”

  “The house?”

  “Fine.”

  “The boat?”

  “New engine, same boat.”

  “The coffee grinder?”

  Oh, stay away from that, Sandy; that is too close to home. In the mornings, when the sun ricocheted off the bay into the bedroom, it had been his custom to get up and make coffee, beginning with shade-grown Costa Rican beans a friend shipped him from San José. He was a fetishist, she teased. Anyone who abandoned her alone and languorous on a big bed in the morning sunshine to make coffee had to be. And a fool to boot, she liked to say.

  “The grinder broke. I threw it away,” Meadows lied.

  “Oh? Somehow, Chris, I can’t imagine you without your trusty grinder. Or is it that there is someone to make your coffee?”

  “No,” he said quickly. “I make it myself still.”

  Meadows struggled unsuccessfully to regain his poise.

  “You…you haven’t changed much, I mean not a bit at all. How have you been? All that time.”

  “It went so fast.” She blurted it out, a set piece. “After we, uh, after I left Florida, I went up to New York and thought about finding a job. But I never got a chance. Almost as s
oon as I got there I met Harold and he…swept me off my feet.” She smiled in apology for the phrase. “We were married in two weeks—can you believe it? Then, bang, along came Jessica right away, and well, Syracuse, when Harold’s company transferred him there. Apart from that I haven’t changed a bit. Big, old-fashioned country girl who likes the sun in her face and sand between her toes.” The smile again.

  Meadows had never understood why she had left him. He had finished his laps one day to find her hunched on the porch steps, head in her hands. He had had faint warnings that something was wrong, but never anything concrete. She had been distant, nervous, skittish, alternately voracious and chill in bed. He had put it down to women’s problems and forgotten it; at the time he had been working hard on a town house for a millionaire in London.

  She had refused to say anything sensible that day. She’d called him obdurate, imperceptive and self-centered, but that was not news to either of them. That afternoon she had left. He’d thought she would come back. She never had—until now.

  “What brings you to Miami?” he asked finally.

  “Fresh air and sunshine, like always. And I wanted Jessica to see the town where I grew up.”

  “Is”—Christ, he couldn’t say Mr. Tilden. What in hell did she say his name was?—“is your husband with you?”

  She spoke quietly. “Harold was killed last fall, a hunting accident. They were after deer. A silly accident.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.” Second lie in three minutes.

  She was looking straight at him. The challenge was there, frank and direct. Before Meadows could accept it—did he want to accept it, almost six years later? And what about Terry?—the little girl came skittering around the corner, carrying a stack of books almost as tall as she was.

  “Mommy, I want these books.”

  “Jessica, you are not a member of this library, and those books are for adults, not for children.”

  “I want them. You promised me ice cream. If I can’t have ice cream, then I want these books.”

  “I’ll buy you the ice cream, darling. The store is just at the corner”

  Meadows had been thinking in high gear, only half hearing the mother-daughter exchange. He had to make a decision. Which? How? He needed some time to think.

  “Look,” he said, “maybe Jessica would like to go for a ride on the bay. I mean, if there’s a nice day while you’re here.”

  “I’m sure Jessica would love that,” Sandy said. “We’ll be at the Crestview until the end of the week. Give us a call—if there’s a nice day.”

  Dammit, she had always been more put together than he. He couldn’t shake her hand again, could he? Should he kiss her on the cheek?

  She didn’t wait for him to decide. Taking the girl by the hand, Sandy smiled, gave a half wave and left the library. Meadows walked slowly to his bike, unaware of much more than that his sweaty palms still clutched the plastic bag with his library books about the Incas.

  The bank was two blocks from the library. It took Meadows three minutes and six years to get there. After Sandy there had been a cheerless procession of one-night stands for Meadows. Plastic women. Windup dolls. He couldn’t even remember most of the names.

  Until Terry. He had met her a year ago, a volcanic Latina with strength enough to turn the tides and beauty enough to make a poet weep. He smiled. It was no exaggeration, though. He had fallen hard for Terry.

  And now here was Sandy, ripping open a scar thought to be healed. Was it nostalgia that had brought Sandy back? Or was it Meadows? No, that wasn’t what was important. There was something else. The equation didn’t balance.

  So Sandy had left him and gone to New York. That made sense. If you’re looking for a change of life, it is harder to get farther from Miami than New York. But to meet some guy and marry him in two weeks? That was crazy, not like her at all. If anything, Sandy had been strait-laced, almost proper, the kind who would go to bed with you only if she thought she loved you. To meet a guy one minute, marry him the next and have a baby the morning after—what the hell kind of way was that to rebound from a love affair? Sandy was too smart for that.

  Meadows parked his bicycle on the red-brick sidewalk outside the bank, then swallowed hard against a lump of lead that suddenly enveloped his gut. Could she have married quickly not as a means of burying an old affair, but as a way of legitimizing its result? Perhaps she had come, not to see Meadows herself, but to have the little girl meet him, so that one day the girl would understand.…

  Meadows covered the few steps to the sidewalk teller in a mental fog. His head reeled, and Bert was no help.

  Bert was a trial, a once-weekly test of endurance, a whining, shuffling, sweaty, living definition of dyspepsia. No doubt Bert’s conception, too, had been a mistake, for thereafter everything else had gone wrong for him.

  “If you have piles, you can’t sit, right? So you have to stand all day. And what happens when you stand? Your arches fall, right?”

  Meadows, Sandy-on-the-brain, had no compassion for Bert this afternoon. It seemed to take an eternity for the teller to open his drawer, count out four twenties and four fives. He put them in a neat stack, lined up the edges and counted them again. Meadows roiled with impatience. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. The sidewalk reflected in Bert’s picture window cage was burning hot. He should have worn shoes, Meadows thought. And where was the rain? He looked up and saw the first gray scout cloud nearly overhead. It wouldn’t be more than a minute or two now. Somehow the thought of biking home alone in the rain didn’t seem as attractive as it had a few minutes before.

  “And the doctors? What do they know? They charge you a lot of money and never fix anything.”

  “There is no justice, Bert,” Meadows muttered as he retrieved his money from the stainless steel drawer that at last shot forward.

  “Now that’s the truth. I was explaining to one of the vice-presidents here and he—look at that crazy bastard!”

  Meadows had a disconcerting moment of dual imagery. He saw Bert’s eyes pop open, his mouth constrict in a shocked O. At the same instant, through the glass of the teller’s cage, Meadows saw a red blur whip past, a car, traveling at an impossible speed on a drowsy business street.

  Meadows whirled to his right. He caught a rear-end view of the car, a Mustang, and what looked like two occupants. The car would never make the corner where the road turned toward the bay. It was going too fast.

  The driver saw that, too. He swerved to the left, hunting for more room. He lost control. The car veered toward the opposite sidewalk.

  Sandy Tilden stood there, hand in hand with Jessica. Jessica was eating an ice cream cone.

  They had no chance. The Mustang hit them both simultaneously. But it was capricious. It tossed Jessica high into the air, a pathetic bundle of rags, the ice cream spinning away like a hailstone. The car dragged Sandy Tilden. She was under it when it glanced off a trash can. She was under it when it grazed the edge of a building. She was under it still when it came to rest against a light pole.

  The bills, four twenties, four fives, dropped unnoticed from Meadows’s nerveless fingers.

  “God. Oh, God,” he moaned. He did not move. He could not move. Nothing moved save a squat black sedan that slid quietly to a halt in the street opposite the Mustang, and then nothing more except the passenger in the sedan.

  He walked with economy, deceptively, the way a good emergency room doctor will get where he is going quickly without wasting the resources he will need when he gets there. But the passenger from the black sedan was not a doctor. He carried a gun. To Meadows, forty yards away, it looked like an obscene black stick.

  The passenger stopped about ten feet from the Mustang. He spread his legs, leveled the gun and fired a long, continuous volley into the Mustang. It was the only sound. Then the passenger turned and strode back toward his car in the same measured pace.

  It was more than Meadows could comprehend. His mind, so intricate, so finely honed, could not fu
nction. He began running. He ran without thought, without purpose. He ran toward the Mustang and the black sedan.

  He had covered perhaps half the distance to the carnage when the passenger noticed him.

  A split-second subconscious image impressed itself, like a Polaroid, on Meadows as he ran. The passenger was tall and burly. He wore aviator’s sunglasses. The face was oval and cruel, with pronounced ridges above the eye and prominent black brows.

  The passenger raised his gun with a casual flick. He fired once.

  Meadows hadn’t the time to recognize the danger, nor did he recognize the searing, angry blow that snapped his right leg from under him and sent him, in an uncontrolled slow-motion pirouette, sprawling onto the hot asphalt.

  He did not hear the screams when they came. He did not sense the fresh wind that announced the squall. And he did not feel the rain that consumed the orphaned ice cream and sent probing red rivulets coursing through the gutter.

  Chapter 2

  “YOU ARE a lucky man.” The voice came from the end of a long tunnel. Meadows, lying on white sheets in a white room, peered up through the voice at the swarthy man behind it.

  “Why am I lucky?”

  “The bullet just tore away some flesh. If it had hit the bone, you really would have been in deep shit. That was an Ingram he hit you with, a submachine, real nasty. You should have seen what it did to those two guys in the car.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Nelson.”

  “Doctor?”

  “Cop.”

  With an effort, Meadows hiked himself higher on the pillows. The movement sent an arc of pain along his right side, but it also chased some of the cotton candy from his head.

  Two men stood by the bed, one tall and blond and muscular, the other shorter, leaner and darker. “That’s Pincus,” the dark man said, pointing. “My partner.” The blond man wore the first crew cut Meadows had seen in years.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Meadows. We would like a few minutes if you feel up to it, sir,” said Pincus.

  Meadows didn’t feel like much of anything. He knew where he was. He knew his wound was more painful than serious. The big-busted nurse had told him that, had urged him to eat a lunch he didn’t want and then had left him. He had lain there a long time, drowsing in the sunshine like an old man, seeking without much success to rearrange jumbled swatches of memory into a coherent beginning, middle and end. He had been shot, and now he was in the hospital. That seemed plain enough. He did not ask about Sandy and little Jessica; he didn’t have to. That much he remembered with a terrible clarity that would ache for the rest of his life.